The dry drinking the moist

Meaning

The expression le Sec boire l’humide, “the dry drinking the moist,” personifies absorption within the account of embodiment. Dryness receives moisture under the action of heat, rather than a fully formed body swallowing a separate finished substance. The subject at this stage is a vapour between spirit and body: it participates in both, is not yet properly a body, and cannot generate while it remains in that intermediate condition. The drinking figure makes the dependence of qualities upon one another intelligible. It should not erase the passage’s negative and transitional terms by describing the vapour as already a productive metal.